


The One Coming Back for You

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/F, Future Fic, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 15:50:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1393453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison laughs. “You did okay,” she points out. “You guys didn’t bring me back.”</p><p>Lydia doesn’t tell her how badly she wanted to. She doesn’t tell her about the nights she snuck into Deaton’s and read all of his books by flashlight. About the Google searches she did, and the frantic clearing of her history afterwards. She doesn’t say that one time, during those first few terrible months, she went over to Stiles’s house and opened his computer and found that episode of <em>Buffy</em>, the one where they bring her mom back, paused on Netflix. And she doesn’t tell her that when Stiles found her watching that episode, he sat at the foot of his bed and said, “I keep reminding myself it’s not a good idea. But then I go and watch the episode where they bring Buffy back and,” and how he dropped off, because it’s a fucking TV show, but if they’re using it to disprove this one thing it should at the very least be consistent.</p><p>Lydia doesn’t tell her that if she had been more talented or Stiles had been less scared, Allison would have been breathing again a month after she died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Coming Back for You

**Author's Note:**

> So basically I was sad and wanted to make it better. 
> 
> This is canon-compliant through the end of 3b and is definitely future AU but shhhh. 
> 
> I'm not sure what to warn for, so if you see something that needs a warning, let me know. (It's rated M for a reason but not as much of one as many people may want.) The plot in this is negligible and shitty but...Allison comes back? So yay? Also there are way too many _Buffy_ references but honestly I don't think I'm capable of writing _Teen Wolf_ fic without mentioning _Buffy_. I'm sorry.

It’s Stiles who left magical tracers all over Beacon Hills. Stiles is the one who laced the whole town tight, who hasn’t let go. There are lines of nylon thread in his closet that hum when something supernatural happens six hundred miles to the north. The lines are stretched straight from ceiling to floor, each a different color to indicate the part of town it represents, and when they go off their vibration frequency tells Stiles the nature of the supernatural things happening near the school (green), near the library (orange), near the supermarket (blue). It’s Stiles who calls Kira when this happens, to tell her to keep an eye out. And it’s Kira who decides whether the supernatural occurrence is serious enough to call Scott up from San Francisco.

Stiles made this magic and he maintains it; he keeps the system going. But it’s Lydia who feels the vibration of the purple string, right at the heart of the dense wall of lines in his closet. It’s Lydia whose hand wraps around the string and silences it, whose hand comes away raw from its high-frequency vibration.

Stiles is out. She’s in his closet, standing in front of his supernatural radar map of Beacon Hills. She’d meant to go out with Yvette; she should be dancing in a club, drinking too many vodka tonics. But here she is. She was at a stoplight, and then she blinked and she was letting herself into Stiles’s apartment.

She did not mean to be here, which of course means that she is supposed to be here.

She wipes her burning hand on the dark fabric of her skirt as she shuts the door to his closet. She locks Stiles’s apartment behind her.

The drive to Beacon Hills is long, hundreds miles of freeway stretching, red with brake lights under the sunset. She presses the burning line on her palm against the steering wheel and keeps her eyes open by force of will and several iced coffees, the dripping plastic cups collecting in her cup holders like tally marks on a prison wall. She drives into the moon until it’s covered by clouds, and then she drives into the dark. Metaphors come too easy with this town. Beacon Hills makes all things into omens.

Lydia left years ago. She doesn’t run easily, but she ran from there. Back then it was a decaying mouth sucking up the last good things in her life, all the good things she needed to keep her back straight. She shuts her eyes some nights and there's Kate Argent on her eyelids. She hears police sirens and there's the feel of Scott’s hands on her wrists, the glint of his fangs in the red blue flash of  lights.

Lydia remembers some of it fondly. Some of the death, even, some of it was victorious. Some of the blood she shed was purposeful. The fountain from Peter’s neck was justified. But she remembers the ambulance and the sheriff, and the look on Stiles’s face when he thought they were too late. She remembers the way she felt, like she missed a whole flight of stairs, when she realized they nearly were.

Lydia remembers too well, is the problem. She knows how Beacon Hills grew monstrous as she grew up. It became a black hole, and now she’s driving straight into it.

She pulls into a shitty motel at the last freeway exit before the town line. She could stay with Kira, but she doesn’t know what she’s here for. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s back until she knows why she’s back.

She pays for the night with cash. The guy at the front desk blows a pink bubble as he tugs the bills across the counter toward him. He looks at her, eyes a high red-veined haze, and grins around the gum. Lydia turns and keeps her back straight. She can feel the tip of a knife tucked against her hip.

Her best friend once taught her never to leave home unarmed.

:::

The purple string represents the strip mall at the far side of town, near the 70’s-era apartment buildings and abandoned warehouses. It’s the setting of a lot of Lydia’s memories, but when she pulls into the parking lot of the strip mall she sees that the place has changed. Only two of the shops are still occupied; there’s a grimy-windowed restaurant and a pharmacy. Lydia starts with the restaurant.

She is not expecting the girl she finds leaning against the bar inside. She is not expecting her at all, but a part of her is not surprised.

Her back is bent as she talks to the bartender. Her hair is falling dark over her shoulder. She’s wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and heeled boots, and all Lydia can think is that she was not buried in those. There’s no dirt smeared on her jeans, no leaves caught in her hair. She looks human and alive as she takes a beer from the bartender and sits at a stool near the end of the bar.

Lydia is still standing against the wall at the entrance. The bar is mostly empty; it’s the middle of the morning. No one should be here. Allison shouldn’t be here because Allison should be dead. Lydia shouldn’t be here because Lydia should be in San Diego, planning a bust on a werewolf pack that has been smuggling dirty heroin for months.

Lydia pushes back from the wall and crosses the room. She orders a beer, too, pays for it and drags it down the counter to sit beside Allison. Allison’s hands are around her glass. Her hands are clean and long-fingered and normal, like Lydia remembers them. Her nails are frayed a little, but frayed like they got from archery, not like she dug herself from under the ground.

Allison doesn’t look up when Lydia sits down.

Lydia looks at her beer and her hands on the bar. She looks at them and listens for Allison. She hears her breathing. Her breaths are raspy, dried out a little. Louder than they used to be. Ten years of disuse might do that to a person’s lungs.

“Have you seen anyone else?” Lydia asks, finally, when it seems obvious that Allison is not going to speak first.

Allison shakes her head, one swift brush of her hair from side to side.

Lydia drinks some beer. It’s terrible, way too early. She’s never liked day drinking, aside from with brunch and bloody mary’s or mimosas. This is a shitty beer in a shitty bar, and it tastes like a hangover.

Allison doesn’t drink hers.

“I found ten dollars in my pocket and...I wanted to see if I could get a drink.” Allison’s voice is dead leaves. Lydia wants to pour water down her throat, to get Stiles to weave a healing spell through her lungs. But Stiles isn’t here. “Because I was too young, when, you know.”

Which answers Lydia’s first question as to whether Allison knows what happened. As to whether she thinks it’s still 2014 and she’s still eighteen.

“It’s been ten years.”

Allison nods. “I saw a newspaper over there.” She nods her head towards the other end of the bar, where a few newspaper sit on a metal rack. As she moves her hair shifts. There’s a shadow on her cheek, a light bruise. Lydia wants to touch it, but she thinks if she touches Allison, Allison might disappear.

“How’d you find me?”

“Stiles.” Lydia pushes her glass toward the edge of the bar. “He keeps track.”

“He knows? But he didn’t come with you?”

Lydia shakes her head. “He doesn’t know. He just let me know.” She stands, straightening her skirt. “Come with me?”

“Where?”

“Hotel off the freeway. Come with me.”

Allison moves slowly, like she’s not sure how she got legs and she’s not sure she likes them. Lydia waits as she moves around the stool and starts toward the door.

Allison doesn’t buckle herself into the passenger seat. She and Lydia ignore the persistent beeping Lydia’s car makes in protest. Allison was super dead. Now she’s alive. A seatbelt’s not going to do shit. They don’t talk on the drive. There’s too much to say, and Lydia has no idea where to start.

Her hand shakes a little as she gets the key into the lock at the hotel. It’s the most ridiculous thing, to see Allison out here in the middle of the California sun. It’s eleven in the morning; Lydia is twenty-seven years old; her best friend came back from the dead.

She gets Allison a glass of water before tugging down the top cover on the bed and sitting down. She gestures to Allison to sit, too, and Allison does, tentatively. Like she might fall through the mattress if she sits too heavily.

“Who brought you back?” Lydia finally asks, the words eating their way from her mouth.

Allison takes a swallow of water. Lydia can see the way her throat works to get it down. When she talks her voice is slightly less raspy. “I don’t know. I woke up—I woke up? I don’t know if that’s what it was—I came back in the apartment above the bar, there. Dressed like this. It was—the apartment, I mean, it was empty. It was dark. I lay there, on a blanket on the floor, until it was light out. Then I went downstairs. Then you found me.”

Lydia reaches out and touches a fingertip to Allison’s wrist. Her skin feels normal, familiar. Like it always did.

“Is anything different?” She keeps her finger there. She can feel Allison’s pulse.

“I’m weak. You can tell that, though.”

“Do you want to shower?” Lydia asks. “Brush your teeth?”

Allison’s mouth moves into a familiar smile. “Why, do I smell awful?”

“No, of course not. I just thought—I mean, you were in a coffin, right?”

“Yeah.” Allison stands, hesitant. “I’ll shower. I can—do you have an extra toothbrush?”

Lydia rubs her hands over her eyes. “I might. I’ve at least got toothpaste. You go shower, I’ll get stuff.”

There are two duffle bags in the trunk of her car. One has an emergency stash of weapons and various magical paraphernalia, the other has extra clothes, mouthwash, shampoo and toothpaste. Stiles used to laugh at her for this, and then he ended up wearing a Victoria’s Secret Pink sweatshirt and oversized (on Lydia) sweatpants on a stake-out. He has his own bag these days.

Lydia tosses her duffle on the bed and unzips the front pocket. She finds floss and a toothbrush still in the package, and a half-used tube of toothpaste. She tosses them on the counter outside the bathroom, then lifts the duffle bag there, too, so Allison can get whatever clothes she wants.

Allison comes out of the bathroom in a wash of steam, wrapped in a short and ratty, but ostensibly clean, whitish towel. Her face, all angles and tightness, softens at the sight of Lydia’s duffle bag. Lydia lies down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, as she hears Allison moving around in front of the mirror, the rustles of clothing as she gets dressed. There’s the rush of water from the tap, the noise of Allison struggling to open the toothbrush, of her brushing her teeth, her spitting.

She comes from the alcove wearing leggings and a large violet sweatshirt, and sits at the foot of the bed Lydia’s lying on. “Death didn’t taste as bad as you would think,” she says, and Lydia shakes her head against the pillow beneath it.

“Here.” Lydia scrabbles at where she’s left her brush on the table between the beds. She hands it to Allison, who hesitates before she reaches over Lydia’s bent knees to take it.

Her hands are shaking as she reaches to run the brush through her dark hair, still only shoulder length, the way it was when she died. Of course, Lydia knows hair doesn’t grow after you die. But it’s absurd that Allison has actually been dead all this time, that her death wasn’t a trick. The possibility of Allison having been alive and hidden, that seems less unreal than the fact of her resurrection.

Allison runs the brush through her hair slowly. She hits a snag and freezes, and then, lips thin, determinedly pulls the brush through before looking at the plastic bristles. A few strands of her hair are wound through them, she holds it up for Lydia to see. Her tone is rueful as she explains, “I thought it’d be something out of a horror movie. I start brushing my hair and it comes off in clumps, because I’m not really alive. Or healthy.”

Lydia pushes up so she’s sitting. She holds out her hand for the brush, but Allison shakes her head. “No, I’ll do it. It’s not, see? It’s all staying in. I just don’t,” She breathes, long whispering breaths, as she returns the brush to her hair. “I don’t understand how everything’s exactly the same. I’m weak, but I can still walk. I’m not…decayed. My body’s still normal. I don’t even have a scar,” she gestures at her chest, where she was stuck, “I’m just like I was before the fight. Except I’ve been dead. So I don’t understand. Something should be wrong.”

Lydia can’t outright deny this, but she does have a valid counter-argument. “The only dead person we’ve known is Peter,” she points out. “Nothing was wrong with him.” She considers, as Allison stares at her, eyes narrowed. “Physically,” she corrects. “He was batshit crazy, but he was before he died, too.”

“I know. But he made himself come back. I didn’t. You, apparently, didn’t. Why am I back, if none of us made me come alive again?”

Allison finishes brushing her hair, sets the brush down on the mattress. She runs a hand over her wrist, like she’s looking for a hair elastic. It’s a familiar gesture, Lydia’s seen her do it so many times. She reaches into her purse where she dropped in the floor, searches around the bottom until she finds a handful of bobby pins, and moves to kneel behind Allison. 

“Here.” Lydia winds Allison’s hair, still mostly wet, onto the top of her head and secures it. She rests her hands on her friend’s shoulders and leans her chin into Allison’s hair, smelling of hotel combination shampoo and conditioner. Smelling clean. “I don’t know, Allison. I don’t know how you’re here.” And, sitting there, fingers just brushing the bones of Allison’s shoulders, thumbs on her shoulder blades, she tells her about the vibrating string in Stiles’s closet, about how she found herself standing in front of it, how she knew she had to come back because of it.

:::

They get deli sandwiches for lunch. Allison hovers behind Lydia in line, watching as she orders for them. Lydia feels like she has a shadow as they wait for their food, but it’s lunchtime and the deli is crowded, and Allison hasn’t seen another soul aside from Lydia and this morning’s bartender in ten years, so Lydia allows her her momentary neuroses. At least she’s out of the hotel room. Lydia wouldn’t have let her stay behind; she’s very against letting Allison out of her sight.

They drive a little ways south, to a park a few towns over, and have a picnic in a small shaded area a few feet off of a path. They used to come here to study, sometimes. Lydia had come here with Aiden once or twice, a long time ago.

Allison eats slowly, repeatedly chewing each bite. “Why didn’t you bring Stiles with you?” she asks, after her sandwich is a quarter gone. “Or Scott? Isaac?”

Lydia rubs at her mouth. “Because I didn’t know what I was going to find when I got here. And I thought the fact that I was alone when I got to Stiles’s apartment meant I should do this alone, too.”

Allison sets her sandwich back on the paper. “Have you told them? Did you call anyone when I was in the shower?”

Her eyes are fixed on Lydia’s. “Stiles has been very careful recently, about not messing up the natural order of things. I don’t think he’d,” Allison’s eyes are wide, lashes up against her skin, “I don’t think he’d kill you,” Lydia hurries, “but I don’t think he’d give you time to adjust, either, before he went after the reason you were brought back.” Lydia looks at Allison’s hands, where they sit inactive on her thighs. “I think you need time to adjust before we take on whoever brought you back. And why they brought you back.”

“And Scott? Isaac? My dad? Is anyone,” Allison bites her lip, “how many others died?”

Lydia nods. It’s a valid question. “Things aren’t as bad as they were. We all left Beacon Hills after high school, except for Kira. She’s still there. She’s doing well, I think. She and Stiles still talk pretty regularly. She and Scott—they’re together, mostly, but Scott lives in San Francisco and I don’t think he’s leaving. Kira loves it here, despite everything. Isaac lives in New York, but he comes to visit. Derek’s—wherever. He shows up sometimes. Stiles and I are in San Diego, like I said. Cora’s around when Derek isn’t. Malia is around when she misses Stiles. None of us really hang out all that much anymore.”

“Except for you and Stiles,” Allison says softly. “And Stiles and Scott?”

“When they get the time. And Stiles and I work together, that’s different.”

“What do you do?” Allison draws her knees to her chest. Her wrists look so thin where they link over her legs. Lydia wants to make her eat the rest of her sandwich, but she knows that if there are any physical changes, the appetite might be one, and she shouldn’t force it. Allison’s body hasn’t had to digest food in ten years.

“We’re supernatural law enforcement. Stiles’s dad started it, after—there was an accident, our senior year. He almost died. He had to get taken to San Francisco. I don’t think Stiles has let him back to Beacon Hills since. When he got to San Diego eventually, to live with Stiles, he thought he would have a better shot at changing things if he admitted that he was going after things most people don’t believe in.”

“What happened? In high school, I mean, to the sheriff?”

Lydia looks down. “There were grave robbers. Stealing bodies, using their hearts and bones and, if they were newer, eyeballs, in some very shady black magic. The purpose of which, we think, was to enslave the whole town. The whole world, maybe. Spells that require human parts are mostly about control. We never knew exactly what these witches intended, because they dug up Stiles’s mom.” Allison makes a strangled noise, and Lydia nods. “The sheriff didn’t like that, so he went in. Everyone had guns, they had cursed bullets. It was a mess. Such a mess. Stiles and I, we…we did what we had to. We never really got any answers out of them, is what I’m saying.”

“Lydia.” Allison waits a few silent minutes, letting the desperate memory fall away. “What about my dad?”

“I don’t know.” Lydia presses her hands between her knees. “I think he’s still alive. We would have heard, I think, if he died. From Scott or Cora, maybe, or Derek. It would have caused a—it would have meant something, to the people Stiles and I work with. None of us has heard from him—or, if anyone has, it’d be Scott. Or Isaac. And I haven’t talked to them about you in a long time.”

Because it’s too painful, of course, but something in Allison’s expression closes at that, some of the miraculous color goes out of her cheeks, the light in her eyes dims. “No, sorry.” Lydia reaches over and grabs Allison’s hands, holds them tightly. “Because talking about you still hurt, Allison, okay? Because we all lost such an important person and that hole you left, for all of us? It’s still very raw. It’s so real, every day. It’s something we learned to live with, but it’s not something we’ve ever filled. Scott and Isaac, I don’t know how they deal with it. Stiles and me? We get by by denial.” And then she asks the question she has wanted to ask this whole time, that one question, the important one. “What was it like, being dead?”

Allison’s answering laugh is dry and rigid. “I don’t _know_. You’d think, at the very least, I’d have found that out. That would have been something. I feel like, I feel like I had a long stretch of darkness. I think of yesterday and I just feel like I shut my eyes, you know? Like yesterday and all those years before, my eyes were closed and today they’re open, and that’s all that I can think of. How yesterday my eyes were shut.”

Lydia doesn’t press. “You wouldn’t be able to remember, I guess. Peter never talked about it.”

Allison glances at her, a fast and sharp look. “Peter didn’t talk about much.”

Lydia shrugs. His last moments were full of words, but she guesses most of them were probably lies.

Allison doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she admits, “I don’t know why I’m back, Lydia. I want to know, but I also—I want to be able to fight again. I want to be strong again. I was so—I was so strong, when I died. Do you remember? My death, it wasn’t good, you know it wasn’t, but it was _right_ , at least. If I’m back, If I’m back for good,” she swallows, and Lydia’s heart seizes a little, because the thought of Allison being back only briefly—it’s not a possibility, she won’t let it be one, “if I’m back for good, I want to be back fighting.”

“You will be,” Lydia promises.

Allison’s mouth opens, like she’s about to say something else, but instead she balls her sandwich up in its wrapper and tosses it into the trash can padlocked to a tree a few feet away. “Yeah, of course.” She pushes slowly to her feet. “Of course I will be.”

:::

They move to a hotel several miles south, because being so close to Beacon Hills is like having the edge of a knife brushing against Lydia’s neck. She sends Stiles one text, saying, _Gone on a mini vacation. I’ll let you know when I’m back,_ and then she wipes her phone, leaves it on the dresser in the bedroom. Stiles might find his way there if he decides to worry about her, using old fashioned GPS locating techniques. He probably won't be able to track them, though, because he doesn't know about Allison, and Lydia has some cloaking magic of her own. 

She’s also trying to avoid whoever brought Allison back. She knows they need to know who did it. She knows that, but Allison gets weak walking back to the car that first day. She can’t finish a fucking deli sandwich. She bites at her nails and she has not asked Lydia for a knife or a bow. So Lydia doesn’t want to scratch too deep beneath the surface yet. She wants Allison to recover. She wants Allison to really be back, to be herself again.

The new hotel is nicer. It’s got a swimming pool and a gym, and Lydia, despite having developed a slight phobia of swimming pools and maintaining a healthy distaste for treadmills, accompanies Allison to the gym in the mornings and the pool in the evenings. They start out walking, side-by-side, and Allison’s faltering steps the first time she starts running nearly break Lydia’s heart. The pool is easier. Lydia lies in the shade of an umbrella as Allison swims laps, all of her high school grace coming back as she cuts through the water. The first few times she can only manage a few lengths of the pool, but she looks healthy doing it. The sight of her in the water makes Lydia breathe easier. 

The first thing Lydia saw in Allison's face when they met in high school was a refusal to stay down, and it's still there, in all her fierce angles. It’s all Lydia can do to keep from tracing them, the lines of Allison’s jaw and lips, to feel where her hardness comes from.

The next hotel is to the northeast. Lydia is aware that she’s moving them away from both Beacon Hills and San Diego, stretching Allison’s boundaries, hoping that Stiles doesn’t search for them. Hoping that whoever brought Allison back doesn’t care what’s happened to her now.

Lydia takes cash from her parents’ bank account, using the debit card they gave her in high school and never took back. Her parents won’t notice. Lydia’s cut ties with them in the past, but they’re currently on speaking terms, so the guilt she feels is negligible. At least they won’t be traceable for being idiots with credit cards.

They move. Allison runs on treadmills, lifts weight, swims in jewel-bright pools. Her skin is dry from the chlorine; she and Lydia leave empty bottles of hotel lotions scattered on the tile floors all over northern California and southern Oregon.

They shop in Wal-Marts and Targets. They wear their hair up in piles on their heads; Allison’s is brittle from all the nights spent swimming.

Lydia thinks a lot about what could be happening back home. Stiles usually wouldn’t accept such a shitty excuse, especially when they had been planning on breaking up a heroin-trafficking ring that week. It’s not like there aren’t other people on their team, and Cora and Malia had been in town when Lydia left, so Stiles would have had backup he trusted. But Lydia still half-expects him to be waiting every time she and Allison get to a hotel.

He doesn’t show. By the third week, this worries her. But when she listens for signs of any disturbances, for death or impending death, when she opens her mouth and screams as she and Allison speed up the freeway at one in the morning, she hears nothing. And so she puts it out of her mind.

:::

Allison has theories. She doesn’t share them in the beginning. At the first few hotels, she’s so exhausted that she falls asleep before eight, sometimes seven, curled comma-like beneath the sheets of whichever bed is nearest the door. Lydia watches her the first few nights, comforts herself with the consistent rise and fall of Allison’s chest. The wonder of Allison breathing.

After two weeks, though, Allison has started to get her strength back. She’s not where she was before her death, not close, really, but she doesn’t fall asleep so quickly. Sometimes she sits up with Lydia. Sometimes—not often—they go out and have nice dinners, not coming back to their temporary homes until after ten.

Eventually, Allison starts asking questions. “What if,” she begins while lying beside Lydia on Lydia’s bed at a hotel somewhere in Oregon, “someone just made this body? Someone somehow caught my spirit and put it into this body, made from—whatever. Like, remember how Stiles used to talk about golems? Like a golem.”

“Made from, what, Allison? _Clay_?”

Allison shoves against her shoulder. It’s not a weak push, and Lydia nearly falls onto the bedside table. She catches herself with her palm and pushes herself back against Allison, a gleeful lightness unfurling at the evidence of Allison’s returning strength.

“Yeah, sure,” Allison says. “Why not? Why is it more believable that my body decayed this little? Most of my flesh should have rotted away. I should have worms in my eyeballs.”

Lydia grabs onto Allison’s wrist, digging her nails into the skin unthinkingly. “Don’t,” she warns, “please.” And when Allison pulls her wrist away Lydia lets go, although she doesn’t want to. But Allison just adjusts a little so she can slide her fingers between Lydia’s, and holds on tight.

“I don’t mean to be morbid,” Allison continues eventually. “But it’s the truth, Lydia. Why am I here, the way I am? Doesn’t it make more sense, that my body is a new body—whether it's made from clay or something else—than that someone restored my old body?”

There’s an easy way to find out what Allison’s made of. They just have to dig up her grave.  Lydia, of course, is not about to suggest that.

“Does it matter?” Lydia asks. She’s read stories about golems. She’s not sure if they’re true or not. Stiles and she have never found one, but Lydia, in all her searching, has never come upon anyone else like herself, so just because something isn’t evident doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. What she’s read on golems, though, suggests that they don’t have the agency Allison does. But Allison _has_ that agency, so why would it matter if her body were made out of magic clay or whatever? She feels like skin, where their hands touch. Her hair feels like hair. She breathes and her heartbeat sounds strong and when Lydia feels her pulse she believes that everything will be normal again.

“What if it’s like a switch or something? I’m allowed to be myself until whoever made me decides they want me to do something, and then? What if I’m not myself? What if they want me to hurt you?”

“You wouldn’t.” Lydia rests her head on Allison’s shoulder, feels its sharpness against her temple. “No matter what magic they’ve got on you, you wouldn’t.”

“Why’d they bring me back, though? If they made me, why’d they make me?”

Lydia bites her lip. She doesn’t want to think of someone—some human or some thing—shaping Allison’s body. She doesn’t want to think of anyone’s hands taking clay or skin or magic, weaves of magic, and turning all of it into an Allison, this Allison. She refuses to accept that. It can’t have been the way it went.

“Maybe because life sucks without you.”

Allison laughs. “You did okay,” she points out. “You guys didn’t bring me back.”

Lydia doesn’t tell her how badly she wanted to. She doesn’t tell her about the nights she snuck into Deaton’s and read all of his books by flashlight. About the Google searches she did, and the frantic clearing of her search history afterwards. She doesn’t say that one time, during those first few terrible months, she went over to Stiles’s house and opened his computer and found the episode of _Buffy_ , the one where they bring her mom back, paused on Netflix. And she doesn’t tell her that when Stiles found her watching that episode, he sat at the foot of his bed and said, “I keep reminding myself it’s not a good idea. But then I go and watch the episode where they bring Buffy back and,” and how he dropped off, because it’s a fucking TV show, but if they’re using it to disprove this one thing it should at the very least be consistent.

Lydia doesn’t tell her that if she had been more talented or Stiles had been less scared, Allison would have been breathing again a month after she died.

:::

Allison unzips Lydia’s duffle bag and finds her arsenal. She pulls out a knife and tucks it, sheathed, against her hip. She finds a pistol. There are no crossbows or bolts or arrows, and Allison’s face as she realizes this is almost comical in its expressive disappointment.

“Sorry,” Lydia tells her, “I never really mastered all that.” She’s standing in front of the mirror, brushing her teeth. It’s late summer, late evening, and they’re back in California. Lydia can tell that Allison is starting to get bored. Her hands are almost reverent as she checks over the pistol.

“No, you never did have the best coordination.”

Lydia shoots a glance at Allison over her shoulder, lips twisted and eyes narrowed, but Allison’s laughing.

“You shouldn’t take offense to that. You’re much better at other things.” 

“I know. But that one thing—your dad tried for a little while, gave up and taught me hand-to-hand combat instead.”

Allison is smiling a little as she sets the pistol and knife down on the desk and turns too heft the weight of the duffle bag off her bed. “We’re going back, aren’t we.” She phrases it like a question, but it’s not one at all.

“Yeah. There’s no point in waiting any longer, is there?” And Lydia means for this to be a question, but Allison doesn’t respond.

They go down to the business office, sit at one of the old desktops humming in a corner, and print out directions for the most direct route back to Beacon Hills. It’ll only take a few hours to get there. Lydia traces her finger over the highlighted streets as she sets the papers on the table beside the computer. It all looks so harmless, laid flat.

“I don’t want to go back,” she confesses, while Allison is changing into one of  the various white men’s t-shirts and boxers she wears as pajamas. Lydia is lying on her back, pretending to read a book on occult practices they picked up in a gas station somewhere just over the border.

Allison comes out from the bathroom and perches on the edge of Lydia’s bed. “You haven’t told me everything that happened there. It sounds…if it stayed the way it was, it was awful, of course, but none of us would have even thought of leaving, no matter how bad it was.” She takes the book from Lydia’s hands and sets it on the bedside table. “But now none of you are there, not even Scott—just Kira. I don’t get it.”

“You dying would have been more than enough to chase us out of there, you have to know that, Allison. And then there was Aiden, and Stiles’s dad, and then…well. We all knew it was the Hellmouth.” Lydia says, like it’s an explanation.

“Our lives weren’t a TV show.”

“They might as well be.” Lydia rolls to look up at Allison. From this angle everything’s well-defined. The room is brightly lit; it’s a nice hotel, modern—they don’t need shitty yellow lamps to disguise their mess here.

Allison slides down and turns so she’s facing Lydia. “Is your life still like that?” she asks. “What you do with Stiles and the sheriff?”

“Of course. Of course it is. But I’m not human, Allison. You know, that’s such a weird thing. I’m not human, so it’s not like I could escape from it. Stiles and his dad and Melissa could have. By the end, they were the only ones from our pack who could have, and none of them chose to.”

“Do you miss everyone?” Allison asks. It’s a halting question.

“We still see each other. We moved apart but we didn’t _grow_ apart, you know? We missed you—they miss you.” Lydia reaches over and brushes some of Allison’s hair from where it’s fallen across her eyes. “The rest of us, we had each other when we needed each other.”

She drops her hand to her side, but Allison is staring at her, their eyes inches apart. Lydia rolls to her back, looks at the ceiling.

“But?” Allison asks.

There shouldn’t need to be a qualifier. She understands what Allison means, though, because Allison understands her. “But we always…honestly, I always needed you.”

“And you could never have me”

“Yeah, well.” Lydia rubs a hand over her eyes. “You were dead.”

Allison is suddenly moving. A leg swings over Lydia’s waist and Allison balances on her knees above her. She drops to her hands, so their faces are so close, so close, and says, “I’m not now, you may have noticed.” The words aren’t a question at all, but they’re requesting permission.

Lydia looks at her. She can barely make out the sharpness of Allison’s expression, the daring wideness of her eyes. She lifts her head, just enough so their noses brush.

At that first touch, Allison turns her head the slightest bit so her mouth comes down on Lydia’s. The kiss begins wet and open, Allison’s tongue against Lydia’s.  The movement is desperate, fast and hard and thrilling.

Allison’s hands are fisting in the sheets on either side of her. “You don’t know,” Allison laughs, when they part to breathe, “do you? I’ve been thinking about this from day one.”

Lydia runs her hands up beneath Allison’s t-shirt. She feels Allison’s skin, laid soft over her ribs, their narrow valleys. Allison shivers, kisses her deep when Lydia’s hands cup her breasts.

“I thought about you in high school sometimes, even.” Allison confesses, pulling back and lifting her t-shirt over her head. Lydia sits up too, and Allison shifts enough so that Lydia’s tank-top can come off.

Allison’s skin is hot and alive, soft all against her when she comes back down.

“I never thought we’d happen.” Allison kisses Lydia, kisses her like she’s dying and Lydia’s keeping her alive. “I thought you were all about dick, all the time.”

Lydia throws her head back to laugh, and Allison uses the opportunity of her stretched beneath her to slide down, her mouth falling along Lydia’s collarbone and lower, kissing right over the pounding of her heart.

“That’s such a vulgar way of putting it,” Lydia says, when she manages to breathe again. Allison’s hands are dropping lower, sliding along the elastic of her underwear, fingers dipping down, slipping easily with how wet Lydia is. Lydia’s whole body jerks.

“But weren’t you? About dick, I mean.” Allison grins evilly, teeth white and lips so red. Her whole body is a bright new magic for Lydia to explore. Lydia shifts as Allison slides her hand from between her legs and tugs her underwear down, over her legs and ankles. Lydia kicks it off and Allison settles back down over her, their mouths touching.

“In high school,” Lydia admits. “Maybe.”

She runs her hands back down Allison’s sides, gets her underwear and the boxers off easily, and slides her fingers between them. Allison’s just as wet as she is. “But I think I have more experience in this area than you do.” She tries to match Allison’s evil grin, but she thinks she probably just comes off looking eager.

Allison rolls off her, lying back against the pillows and looking, as Lydia settles between her legs, like she’s the most beautiful, hungriest, most human person in the world. Way prettier than a myth. Lydia leans lower, kissing the inside of Allison’s thighs. Allison doesn’t make a sound, but her knees knock against Lydia’s shoulders and her hand winds itself, tight, Lydia’s hair. “Jesus,” she mutters, when Lydia’s tongue moves. And then, again, when Lydia slides a finger, then two, inside her.

Allison comes fast, body pulsing. Lydia’s mouth follows her through it, and then Lydia kisses her way up Allison’s torso, Allison drawing her with aggressive tugs at her hair.

Finally Allison’s mouth captures hers, and Lydia kisses her back, knowing what Allison’s tasting—herself, with possibly the slightest chemical layer of hotel mouthwash underlying it. But mostly herself, and the taste and the feel of Allison’s mouth on hers is enough to send Lydia’s body into overdrive. When Allison’s fingers slide, so easily, inside of her, Lydia’s gone. She’s keening, kissing Allison messily, erratically, as Allison sets a devastating rhythm, fingers sliding in and out of her and up to rub sensitive circles. Lydia clings to her as she comes, her teeth and lips against Allison’s shoulder.

Lydia’s legs wrap around Allison’s, their bodies meeting hard and soft in places. “When did you start?” Allison asks.

Lydia runs a thumb over Allison’s lower lip. “God, you know? I thought about you so much and then there you were, alive and sitting in a bar. I don’t know, I just saw you and thought I wanted to kiss you so badly. I wanted you to be there. I wanted to feel that you were there, all over me.”

“But you didn’t,” Allison points out.

“I didn’t really believe it was you, at first. And then—that was never us.”

“And now?”

“We’re different people.”

Allison kisses her, mouth closed. “And,” Lydia presses her forehead against Allison’s, “you’re here. You’re here, and I know that as much as I know anything else.”

:::

They shower separately the next morning, although Lydia thinks about getting into the shower after Allison, about massaging shampoo into her hair, touching her wet skin and letting the whole room steam up.

She doesn’t. What they’re doing is more important than what they have; she knows that. Whoever brought Allison back didn’t just bring her back so Lydia could kiss her.

They’ve put it off long enough, so she doesn’t follow Allison into the shower, and she doesn’t kiss her when she gets out, still dripping, the white towel looking so soft on her skin.

They kiss briefly against the door before they leave the hotel room. Allison catches at Lydia’s hand and pushes her back, so her shoulders hit the surface and her hip knocks against the doorknob.

They separate after minutes. “I don’t want to go back,” Lydia says again, “but we have to.”

“We do.” Allison keeps her hand in Lydia’s. They’ve each got a duffle bag over their shoulder. Lydia has a knife in each boot, and she knows Allison has at least two. She thinks she’s also secreted away the pistol, maybe beneath her skirt, maybe beneath the billowy sweater she’s wearing.

"To the Hellmouth." Allison clicks her seatbelt in place.

Lydia starts the car.

:::

They go back to the hotel they stayed in the first night. It’s still shitty. Allison doesn’t care, and Lydia still can’t bear the thought of staying inside Beacon Hills. They drop their bags, check their weapons, and then, standing at opposite ends of the room, look at each other.

Allison starts laughing. “I thought,” she breathes, “I thought it was going to be easy.”

“I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do. I thought maybe whoever woke you up would just show up when we did. Or they’d be waiting for us?”

Allison shakes her head, drops to her knees and covers her mouth, shoulders shaking. “God,” she finally breathes. Lydia crosses to kneel in front of her. Allison’s eyes are bright. “This whole time I kept telling myself we were getting ready for something like a war. And now it’s, what is it, Lydia? It’s just—the same, it’s just waiting. I’m still back and now what do we do? I feel like I’m hanging.”

“We go to Beacon Hills.” Lydia stands, holds her hand out for Allison. “We go there, and we’ll,” and now she has to say it, “We’ll go to the bar. We’ll go to your grave. We’ll go to Kira, if we have to.”

“What will she do?” Allison is following Lydia toward the door.

“She’ll know if anything weird has happened.”

“Other than me coming back? Because you said no one knew about that.”

Lydia opens the door. She leads Allison to the car and doesn’t look at her as she reverses from the parking lot.

“I don’t think we’ll be allowed to just go home, will we?”

“I don’t even have a home.” Allison’s tone is bitter.

Lydia jerks one shoulder up against the seatbelt. It holds her firmly in place. “You’re with me.”

“I don’t,” Allison starts, but she trails off. They’re back over the town line, have just passed the overly cheery Welcome to Beacon Hills sign, and Lydia feels the transition like a fist to her gut. She doesn’t push their conversation, because Allison has gone pale.

They go to the bar first. There are cars in the lot this time, and the bar itself is fairly crowded, which makes it easier for Lydia and Allison to skirt around the edges to the door at the back that leads to the stairs up to the apartment where Allison first came back to herself. Lydia tugs a bobby pin from her  hair, a few strands catching in it and coming free from her bun, and kneels to pick the lock.

They move quietly up the stairs, but there’s no need to. When they reach the top, the room is empty. There’s a blanket spread crumpled on the floor, dust everywhere. To all appearances, it looks like no one’s been their since Allison. Lydia swallows her disappointment. Allison grabs her hand and pulls her back down the stairs.

She takes Lydia’s keys from her once they’re in the parking lot. Lydia doesn’t fight her; she knows where they’re going, and she doesn’t want to be the one to take them there.

There’s crime scene tape around Allison’s grave.

“Not clay, then,” Allison says.

Lydia takes the keys back.

Stiles is leaning against the wall by the door to their room when they get back to the hotel. He looks terrible, skinnier than he had when Lydia left San Diego months ago, fiercely dark shadows grown under his eyes. He doesn’t push away from the wall as they get out of Lydia’s car. He waits until they’re standing in front of him. Allison stands at Lydia’s shoulder. She stares at Stiles, just stares at him, and Lydia waits for Stiles to break the silence. He always does.

“Everyone’s looking for your body,” he tells Allison. “I was the only one looking for you alive.”

Allison does a fair pair of jazz hands. “You found me.”

“I found Lydia,” he corrects. “Because you came back here, and I put a tracer on this place. I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.” He narrows his eyes at Lydia. “How’d you do it?”

“Do what?” Lydia digs the key to the room from her pocket and crosses to open the door. Stiles could have picked the lock; he didn’t, so she’ll let him.

“Bring Allison back.”

Lydia stops, key in the lock. She turns, pins Stiles with a glare. “I _didn’t_.”

Allison rocks back on her heels as Stiles says, “Yeah, I had thought we agreed that resurrection was not our game. But, look,” he glances at Allison, and there’s something apologetic in the expression, in the line of his mouth, “here she is. So if you didn’t, who did?”

Lydia turns the key and shoves the door open with her hip. “We don’t know.”

Stiles rubs a hand over his face. “Okay, right. Good. Except someone did. So.”

“That’s what we’re doing here,” Allison explains. “To find out who did.”

Stiles drops to the foot of the bed and looks between them. “Will one of you tell me what’s happened? All I know is you send me that shitty text, Lyd, before we were supposed to bust that fucking heroin ring, and then I can’t find you for two and a half months. I put a ward on this whole hotel, and you triggered it, but I couldn’t find _you_. So. What happened?”

 Allison says, “I opened my eyes,” and they go from there.

:::

Kira lives in on the ground floor of an apartment complex at the center of town. She has two cats and way too many katana hanging on the walls. Stiles calls her before they come, so she doesn’t look surprised to see Allison. The two move carefully around each other at first; she had never had a chance to really know Allison, and had slid almost too easily into the group after Allison died. It’s one of Lydia’s more shameful memories, the way she held Allison’s death against Kira for months. Kira, whose steady hand kept Lydia from taking revenge on so many people throughout the later years of high school, has never seemed to carry a grudge.

Now, though, with Allison in Kira’s apartment, everything is a bit off. And maybe it’s because she and Allison have only had each other these last couple of months, and suddenly everything seems more real—it was easier, she’s willing to admit, to be in hiding, than to bring resurrected Allison to normal life, or what passes for normal to them.

Kira makes them tea. When Allison tries to refuse it, Kira forces the delicate rose petaled cup into Allison’s hand. Stiles drinks his too fast, like he always does, and burns his mouth. Lydia sits beside Allison, tucks one foot between Allison’s, and watches as Kira perches on the edge of the armchair and Stiles begins pacing from one end of the room to the other.

“So what do we do?” Stiles asks. “You haven’t seen anything, have you?”

Kira shakes her head. “It’s been quiet here, lately. Very quiet. You’d know, anyway, wouldn’t you? Don’t your tracers still work? Isn’t that how Lydia found Allison?”

“Well, yeah.” Stiles leans against the wall and then pushes forward, before rocking a little on his heels. “But I’ve been here, so I’m not actually able to see what’s going on there.”

“Which was a flaw in your plan,” Lydia points out, and Stiles waves his hands at her.

“Shut up, I wouldn’t have been here if you had just told us what happened in the beginning.”

“Why didn’t you?” Kira asks the question over the lip of her teacup, and Lydia shifts closer to Allison.

“I was worried,” Lydia admits. “This isn’t necessarily good magic, even if the end result is good.” She glances at Allison, who’s placed her still full teacup on the coffee table and has her chin in her hands. “I wanted to make sure that the result was good before I let anyone know.”

Allison glances at her. “You wanted to make sure I was me.” Her tone is hard and tired.

“You weren’t sure, either, to begin with,” Lydia points out. She reaches for Allison’s hand. “If it wasn’t you, then—if it wasn’t you and it was something bad, it would have had to have been me to do it, to get rid of whatever was using your body, you know, and if it wasn’t you but it wasn’t bad, then I could have helped. Plus,” she looks at Kira and Stiles, both of whom are watching them with their lips caught between their teeth, “I was the one who found it. Alone. I didn’t call anyone, before or after. I just ended up there. I thought that probably meant something.”

“Yeah, it meant that I wasn’t home,” Stiles mutters.

“That doesn’t matter,” Kira points out.

“What matters is what we do now.” Allison disentangles her hand and legs from Lydia’s and stands up. “Does anyone have any ideas?”

“We have to find out who brought you back,” Kira says.

“Yeah, obviously,” Stiles puts in, “but how? We can’t exactly sit Allison down in the middle of town. Like, hey, anyone remember resurrecting this girl two months ago?”

Allison twists her hands together. Lydia watches her. “Has anyone told Scott I’m back? Isaac? My dad?”

Kira shakes her head. “I texted Scott and told him he should come home. I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to be the one to tell him.”

“My dad?” Allison presses.

Stiles pulls at his ear. “I don’t know where he is. Isaac does, I think.”

“Isaac, then, have you told him?”

“You’ve been back for months,” Stiles says it again, “months,” like going in circles is the only way he can see to move forward. “Why are you thinking about this now?”

“I wanted to be strong enough to be able to help. I did not want to invite everyone I love to my second funeral. I wanted,” Allison stamps her foot, and the movement catches at Lydia’s heart, a little, it’s so young, so soft with nostalgia, “to celebrate my resurrection.” She rests a hand over her mouth. “I wanted to be strong,” she repeats.

Stiles looks at her. Really looks for the first time, it seems to Lydia, since he met them outside the hotel room.

“We missed you,” he says, and it’s not suitable timing at all, but it’s honest.

Allison nods. She squeezes her eyes shut and takes two sharp-sounding breaths. “Okay,” she opens her eyes. They’re shiny. “Okay, so. Scott shows up. We should call Isaac?”

“He’ll come with Scott,” Stiles says, “he’s visiting.”

“Why,” Lydia asks, leaning back against the cushions of the couch, “is Scott not here with you? Does he not know that Allison’s body was dug up?”

“We didn’t want him to know,” Kira says, “until we knew what it meant.”

“And how’d you keep it from him? I didn’t think Scott was that isolated.”

“I just don’t mention it.” Kira shrugs.

“So do we wait for Scott?”

Allison holds out her hand, looking at Stiles. He hesitates, then slides his cell phone from his pocket, rests it on her palm. She brushes past Lydia, legs bumping against Lydia’s knees as she disappears into the kitchen.

Kira looks at Lydia, who looks at Stiles. “Do you think Cora knows where the Argents are these days? Or Derek?”

“They might.” Stiles shakes his head. “None of us really mention them, you know.”

They can hear Allison talking, but they can’t hear what she’s saying. Her tone sounds rushed, excited.

“I really can’t believe it.” Kira’s voice is so soft, Lydia’s not even sure she wants a response.

“She’s really—everything’s normal?” Stiles asks, crossing the room and sitting beside Lydia on the couch.

“Nothing’s changed. I mean, except, obviously she’s older. Dying aged her just as much as being alive aged us.”

“More, maybe.” Kira looks over Lydia and Stiles’s heads towards the kitchen. “Why do you think she was brought back?”

“For a while she thought maybe someone had put her under some sort of spell, like a compulsion thing. Like it wouldn’t be activated until whoever did it wanted it to be, so she was able to live as she wanted for a while. But the longer we stayed away the less likely that seemed. I could understand waiting until she was stronger, but waiting until she was as strong as she had been? That seemed excessive. And,” Lydia shakes her head, “why wait ten years in the first place, if that was the case?”

Allison comes back in. She hands Stiles his phone and then sits beside him. “I talked to Isaac. He knows where my dad is.”

“Are they coming?” Kira asks.

“Yeah. Isaac and Scott will get here in an hour. My dad’s in Washington state. Isaac said he’d call him.”

“Did he believe it was you?” Lydia leans over Stiles. Allison’s face is set, like she’s holding herself together carefully.

“Not at first. But then, none of you expected me.”

:::

Scott and Isaac stand in Kira’s doorway and stare. Lydia wonders if her face went through as many expressions when she first saw Allison.

“Really,” Scott says, suddenly crossing the room and seizing Allison from the couch, pulling her into a tight hug, “it’s really real. You’re really you. Oh Jesus, Allison, oh, Jesus.” He starts talking into her shoulder, words muffled by her sweater. Lydia sits on her hands as Isaac crosses the room to join them, hugging both of them at once. Stiles wraps a hand around Lydia’s wrist.

It’s been a long time since they’ve all been together.

:::

Lydia and Stiles go out to get dinner. Stiles drives, because Lydia’s not up to fighting him on it.

“What are you and Allison going to do once this is settled?”

“I don’t know.” Lydia glances at him. He’s watching the road, which is, to be honest, a little unnerving. Stiles is inexplicably a better driver when he’s acting distracted. “Do I still have my job?”

“As a founding member, we couldn’t fire you if we wanted to. And we don’t, obviously, although I’m still pissed at how you handled this. Did you think I was going to kill Allison without giving her a chance at proving she was okay? You were the one who was so against resurrection, if I remember correctly.”

It’s a low blow, and from the way he’s still refusing to look at her, he knows it. “I was against Peter’s resurrection,” she reminds him, unnecessarily, “because he was evil and also he used me. Allison’s—you know I wanted to do it when she first died. You know I thought about it. I know you did, too.”

“But we were so naïve, and even then we knew we wouldn’t have managed it well.”

“Yeah,” Lydia acknowledges. “I wasn’t worried about you killing her. I was worried about her, mostly. Her managing. About this,” she gestures at the inside of the car, “this planning, this not knowing what’s going on, this whole sideshow that was high school. I was scared if we went immediately into this phase then she wouldn’t settle. And I needed her to settle.” She sucks her lower lip between her teeth. “You get it, right? We couldn’t get her back and lose her again. And if we had to—it’s like she said. She didn’t want everyone to know.”

“And now you think she’s back for good?”

“I think the only possibility of her not being back for good is if the spell gets undone. So we need to find out who did it, so we can make sure it never does.”

Stiles flicks on his signal and pulls into the parking lot of the pizza restaurant they frequented in high school. They sit in silence, looking at the neon sign. The p and the z’s are still blown out.

“Nothing changes in this town, does it?” Stiles shoves his door open. Lydia follows.

“That’s why we left.”

“It sucks.”

Lydia doesn’t point out that he’s the one who refused to let go. It's not like she can hold that against him now.

:::

They don’t leave Kira’s apartment that night. They sit in the living room, trying to find the time to tell everything that’s happened in the last ten years. Most of Stiles’s stories Allison has already heard from Lydia, and Scott cheerfully talks over him when he starts to speak. Allison and Lydia are curled at one end of the couch, Stiles spread out on the other. Kira and Scott sit on the floor, resting against the wall across the room, and Isaac is sprawled in the armchair.

Lydia is aware that it’s not the whole pack, but it is the part of the pack that mattered the most to her before graduation, and having them here, and having that them include Allison, it’s an unreal sort of relief.  

Around three in the morning, when even Scott’s voice is starting to sound cracked, lights sweep through the front window and across the back wall. Kira gets stiffly to her feet, then hesitates by where Isaac’s sleeping in the chair, his neck thrown back over the arm and his legs stretched so his feet rest on the floor.

Kira looks over at Allison. “Do you know what he told them?”

Allison shakes her head. She’s dug her nails into Lydia’s thigh through Lydia’s leggings, and Lydia tightens her grip on her shoulder.

Kira nudges Isaac, who flies awake, whole body tensing.

“What’d you tell Chris?”

He pushes himself to his feet, scrubs a hand through his curls and then over his eyes. “I just said that we had some news, that he should come back. I didn’t, I thought maybe,” he looks over at Allison, who’s beginning to slip away from Lydia. “You’d want to talk to him?”

Allison uncurls from the couch, straightens her shirt and reaches down for Lydia. Lydia takes her hand and stands beside her. “Come with me,” Allison instructs, and then she tugs Lydia from the room.

Chris is just getting out of the SUV when Allison opens the door to Kira’s apartment and the motion-sensor light over it flicks on. He stands by the open driver side door. He looks at her.

His mouth opens but he doesn’t make a sound.

Lydia disentangles her fingers from Allison’s and rests a hand on her shoulder, pushing slightly. Allison takes a few faltering steps forward and then she’s crashing against her father. Lydia leans back against the door and looks up at the moths flicking against the light.

She glances down when she hears the sound of another door opening. Allison is saying something against her dad’s shoulder, and someone else is getting out of the SUV. He’s young, maybe seventeen. He looks at Allison and her dad and the shadows from the light make his face look smug. Lydia dislikes him immediately.

He walks to stand beside her. He has a careful walk, a quiet one, and she knows that he’s a hunter. Of course he’s a hunter.

“Jerry Argent.” He extends a hand to her. She shakes it, trying not to let her distaste show.

“Lydia Martin.”

“I figured.” He leans his side against the door. “Uncle Chris talks about you a lot.”

“Uncle,” Lydia repeats. “You’re not Kate’s kid?” The thought of Kate still leaves a rotten taste in her mouth, the smell of gasoline in her nostrils. She remembers going with Cora and Derek and Scott to sprinkle Kate’s ashes at the town dump. Cora had made a playlist. It was the most irreverent moment of her high school life, and she remembers so vividly the gleeful freeing feeling of it, the lifting wild sound of the wolves’ howls. She would not be happy, not at all, if this smug asshole was more closely related to Kate than Allison or Chris was.

“No.” The boy’s smirk drops a little. “I’m Chris’s cousin’s kid. I just call him uncle because it’s easier.”

Allison and Chris step away from each other. Allison turns, and Lydia can see that both she and her father have been crying. Jerry lets out another satisfied sounding hum.

“You don’t seem too surprised to see Allison alive,” Lydia says. “Did you know her?” By which she means to ask if he had met her, or if Chris ever mentions her.

“When I was really little I met her. But I know about her, of course. She changed the purpose of our whole family.”

“Did you know she died?”

Allison and Chris come to stand in front of them. Allison stares at her cousin. Her expression scares Lydia; it’s tense and rigid.

“You’re the one—you brought me back.”

The boy faces her. “I did.”

Chris has slammed him against the door before either Allison or Lydia can react.

“What,” Chris’s voice is a low growl, “did you do that for?”

Jerry’s eyes have gone wide, and his hands scrabble against the door, his legs hang useless. If Allison’s father had gotten her in that position, she’d have fought her way out of it. Hell, by the time Chris left Beacon Hills, Lydia and Kira and Malia would have all been able to fight their way out of that.

Jerry’s explanation is high and rushed, “I found a spell and you’re always moping around saying how Allison would handle something and what Allison would do and I knew none of us was ever gonna be Allison, but I figured I at least knew how to do magic so why not try and bring her back if I could and if I could then you could have Allison back and that would be good, right? So I was just trying to help the family, I swear to God. And then I just go out to get food and she's gone, I can't find her, no matter what I do, and I thought—something awful, and I was so worried, this whole time, but now here she is. So that's good, too, right? Everything worked out okay.”

Chris lets go of him. He falls to his feet, barely catching himself before his knees hit the ground. “You’re an idiot,” Chris accuses. He turns to Lydia. “It’s good to see you again. May we come in?”

Lydia reaches behind her to find the doorknob and pushes the door open. “Sure.” She steps back. Chris pushes Jerry through with a tight grip on his shoulder. Allison stops beside Lydia and takes her hand again. “I don’t—he just looks like such an ass,” she hisses in Lydia’s ear.

“He seems like one, too.” Undeniably phenomenal magical ability aside, Lydia can find nothing to like about the kid.

“We heard.” Scott and Isaac have half-shifted, fangs and claws out. They’re growling at Jerry, whom Chris pushes unceremoniously down onto the couch.

“I don’t get why you’re all so upset. I did a good thing.” The kid would be shouting if his voice weren’t so high and reedy. As it is, it sounds like he’s wheezing.

“You could have fucked everything up.” Stiles crouches down in front of him, and Chris steps back, beside the werewolves. “Have you never seen _Buffy_?”

“No.” Jerry crosses his arms. “I don’t see what a stupid TV show has to do with anything. I brought Allison back, I did it. She’s alive. She can come home and work for the family and everything’s good. Why is everyone so pissed? You were certainly happy enough to see her,” he throws at Chris.

“Of course we’re all happy to see her.” Stiles leans into the kid’s space. He looks like he’s about to make some sort of extravagant speech but Allison steps away from Lydia before he can start.

“The thing is,” Allison says, “yeah, great, I’m alive again. I appreciate that what you did was difficult and that you did it well, which is impressive. No one is going to deny that. I am happy to be back with everyone. But it was not your place to decide, and it was not _good_ for you to do it on your own. I could have come back a monster. I could have come back worse than a monster. You didn’t know what was going to happen. I don’t care how goddamn confident you are about your magic ability, your confidence doesn’t fucking matter. You’re messing with cosmic shit, here, and you can’t do that without telling anyone. And what if I hadn’t wanted to come back?” She has a knife in her hands. No one steps forward as she presses the blade against the kid’s throat, and he reaches up to try to grab it from her hand, but she catches his wrist before he can. “You can’t just take away a person’s agency. Even if they’re dead.” She presses the knife against his throat enough to make him bleed a tiny bit, just a line dripping from the blade. “Understand?”

He hesitates, but eventually says, “Yes.”

“Good.” Allison steps back. She looks at her dad. “I don’t like him.”

“He was raised by someone outside of the family.” 

And Allison rolls her eyes. “I knew _that_.” 

The kid doesn’t make another sound, although later Lydia notices Stiles drag him off into one of the back rooms. She considers following him, but Allison’s head is pillowed on her lap. Stiles will take notes; he hates anyone being better at magic than he is.

:::

They go back to the hotel to get their stuff.

Allison sits down on the bed and looks around her. “I think I’m going to go,” she says. Lydia stops folding her sweater and turns to look at her.

“Go where?” She feels a little like her heart is being stepped on. By a stiletto. Repeatedly.

“Washington, with my dad. Not for good.” Allison is in front of Lydia suddenly, hands cupping her chin and gaze insistent. “Not for good, I promise. I just want to see what’s happening there. What’s going on with the family. And I can’t just follow you, Lydia. You understand that, don’t you? I can’t just slide into your life like that.”

Lydia nods because she does, of course she does. Allison would never live just to be someone’s favorite person.

But she needs reassurance, still, with Allison there in front of her. “But you’re not just sliding out of it, right?”

Allison kisses her, teeth on her lips. A hard and violent kiss. “Never again, I swear to God. Never again.”

When she drops her hands Lydia has fingernail marks on her face. She can see them reflected in the mirror on the wall over Allison’s shoulder, red half moons all down her jawline. She leans forward to catch Allison’s mouth.

“Come with me eventually?”

“Soon, soon,” Allison promises, and then she’s pushing Lydia back onto the bed, falling down on top of her. “Soon,” she repeats, and Lydia believes her.

**Author's Note:**

> I really hope that didn't suck.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
